Earlier this week, the Judiciary Committee's
Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement held a hearing on Rep.
Lamar Smith's (R-TX) new attack on immigrants' rights, H.R.
1932, the "Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011." According to a House
Judiciary Committee press
release, "This bill will allow DHS to detain dangerous criminal immigrants
beyond six months who are under orders of removal but cannot be deported."

According to Ahilan Arulanantham, Deputy Legal Director of
the ACLU of Southern California, the bill will open the door to a severe
intrusion on the rights the Supreme Court has upheld for certain immigrants:

H.R. 1932 authorizes DHS to indefinitely lock up people who have lost their
cases -- potentially for a lifetime -- even in cases when the government cannot
deport them (e.g. because the person is stateless, or because we have no repatriation
agreement with the home country).

A 2001 Supreme Court ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis held that, barring
some extenuating circumstances, immigrants awaiting deportation can't be
detained longer than six months. Republicans have long claimed that releasing
such individuals constitutes a public safety risk, citing stories of crimes
committed by those released after the six-month period.

But Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement
official, testified
during the hearing on H.R. 1932 that "Since the beginning of FY 2009, ICE has
released 12, 567 individual aliens. ... Of this amount, 868 were re-booked into
ICE custody, which is a relatively low re-detention rate of 7 percent." In an
attempt to correct this statistically small problem, Smith is willing to attack
the due process rights of thousands of immigrants — a move Arulanantham argues
is unconstitutional.

Smith is also willing to leave American citizens with the
bill. According to the Detention Watch
Network, immigration detentions in 2009 already cost taxpayers an extra
$1.7 billion. With Smith's bill, detentions, and ultimately costs, will only
increase.

In addition, many of those who would be detained are asylum
seekers who do not warrant criminal treatment. As Annie Sovcik of Human Rights
First explains,
"As a nation committed to the rule of law, the United States must guarantee
basic due process protections designed to prevent asylum seekers and other
immigrants from being subjected to arbitrary and prolonged detention."